Epicurious Kitchens exists because we kept watching the same problem happen. Serious home cooks — people who own proper knives, who understand the Maillard reaction, who've spent years developing real technique — were getting kitchens designed around how their spaces look instead of how they actually work. Beautiful rooms. Useless layouts. We decided to do something different.
We started by doing what no kitchen designer in Pittsburgh was doing: treating cooking practice as the primary design input. Before we talk about cabinetry or countertops, we run every client through what we call the Culinary Life Audit — a deep-dive into how you actually cook. What equipment you own and what you plan to own. Whether you work a single station or move across the kitchen in sequence. Whether you cook solo or alongside a partner. Where your hands go when you're in the middle of a real meal. That process takes time, and it changes everything. The kitchen we design for someone who does a lot of high-heat wok cooking looks nothing like the one we design for someone who bakes serious bread and does long braises on weekends — even if the square footage is identical.
We're based in Greater Pittsburgh and rooted in this food community. We know the serious home cooks here, the chefs who've gone residential, the people who've come back from a trip somewhere and decided their kitchen needs to match their ambitions. This city has a real culinary culture beneath the surface, and it deserves kitchen design that takes it seriously. That's the only kind we do.
What We Value
Workflow Before Aesthetics
A kitchen can be stunning and completely dysfunctional — we've seen it more times than we can count. We establish that every movement, every landing zone, every storage decision performs correctly before we talk about finish selections.
Fluency in Your Equipment
We know what a Wolf range needs to vent properly, what a Vitamix drawer requires, and why your current sheet pan drawer is the most frustrating thing in your house. We design around your actual gear inventory, not a hypothetical homeowner's.
No Generic Solutions
We don't have a signature look because we don't believe in one. Every kitchen we build is a direct translation of one cook's specific practice into physical space — and that means every project looks and functions differently.